War, terror, silence, restoration. [Jer 31]

I came home last night and the son had a face like thunder. He had been watching Stefan Molyneaux on Trump. He is worried, for basic strategy says do not poke the bear.

He is despondent. The news is bleak.

Russia warned on Friday that U.S. cruise missile strikes on a Syrian air base could have “extremely serious” consequences, as President Donald Trump’s first major foray into a foreign conflict opened up a rift between Moscow and Washington.

The warships USS Porter and USS Ross in the Mediterranean Sea launched dozens of Tomahawk missiles that hit the airstrip, aircraft and fuel stations of Shayrat air base, which the Pentagon says was involved in a chemical weapons attack this week.

It was Trump’s biggest foreign policy decision since taking office in January and the kind of direct intervention in Syria’s six-year-old civil war his predecessor Barack Obama avoided.

The strikes were in reaction to what Washington says was a poison gas attack by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that killed at least 70 people in rebel-held territory.

They catapulted Washington into confrontation with Russia, which has advisers on the ground aiding its close ally Assad.

At the same time, the ongoing destruction of the trust people have in the stranger continues.

Swedish police have arrested a man in north Stockholm and he has confessed to carrying out a deadly truck attack in the centre of the city which killed at least four people, daily Aftonbladet reports.

Another 15 were wounded, nine of them seriously, in the horror attack after a hijacked truck rammed into a crowd then crashed into a department store in central Stockholm, Sweden.

We can too easily look at the news and give up. This is not our job: we need to do our calling. We are placed in families and tribes and nations and we are to care for them. We are to protect them.

And in this fallen age we still have to tell each other to know the LORD.

Jeremiah 31:27-34

27The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. 28And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD. 29In those days they shall no longer say:
“The parents have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”
30But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.

31The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt — a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

At this time, it is too easy to be distracted. There is much evil in this world, and much pain. The tactic of terror is to encourage reprisals, preferably indiscriminate, to drive the people to the very groups that promulgated terror, as they are the least noxious alternative.

In this time, we have to carve out places of silence, where we can think, and love, and care.

It is not a luxury good. It is essential. The first tactic is to not be connected to the news cycle 24/7. Look intermittently. The , second tactic is to pray. And the third is to look after those in your family, care for them, provide for them, and let the princes of this world work out their own damnation.

For the princes of this world choose to know power, and not the LORD.

We should instead follow the example of my son. He will travel to find a job, using church connexions, and he is praying for Bruce, w who is in hospital.

Do what you can in your family. Do not aspire to be of the elite or to control the narrative. For their time will end, and their sins they will pay account for.

Instead know God, and enjoy him forever.

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